“Don’t see where the pauper comes in,” growled the Honourable Jim. “A hundred thousand pounds is surely enough to keep a man from the workhouse. And if that lot of money is going around begging, I don’t see why the little chap shouldn’t have it. I’ve nothing to leave him,—why the deuce don’t you let the old lady take him and have done with it?”
“Well!” exclaimed Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, with a lachrymose air of deeply seated injury, “if you are so lost to decency as to wish to part from your own flesh and blood——”
“Oh, hang it all!” burst out the “Honourable” scion of century-condensed aristocracy: “D——n your flesh and blood! Have it your own way! Do as you d——n please! Only don’t bother me.”
In this way such marital discussions always ended,—and Boy struggled steadily along in growth and being and thought, wholly unconscious of them. He had lost sight of Miss Letty, but truly had not forgotten her—though in the remote village on the sea coast where his father had now elected to dwell in order that he might indulge in his pet vice without undue public comment or observation, he found himself so utterly estranged from all delicate and helpful sympathies as to be almost rendered stunned and stupid. In the first year after he had left London he was taught some desultory lessons by a stolid-faced country wench who passed for being a nursery governess, but whose abilities were chiefly limited to ogling the young sailor and farmer lads of the place, and inventing new fashions for arranging her coarsely abundant hair. Boy’s contempt for her knew no bounds: he would sit and watch her out of the corners of his eyes while she stood before a lookingglass, smirking at her own reflection, and quite unwittingly he developed a curious vein of satire which soon showed itself in some of the questions he put to her and to others. A sad little change had taken place in him—the far-off, beautiful angel look of his countenance had all but vanished, and an expression of dull patience combined with weariness had taken its place. For by this time of course he had found out the true nature of “Poo Sing’s” chronic illness, and the knowledge of it had filled him with an inexpressible disgust and shame. Child though he was, he was not too young to feel a sick thrill when he saw his father march into the house at night with the face, voice, and manner of an infuriated ruffian bent on murder. And he no longer sat in a chair innocently murmuring “Poo Sing”—but slunk away from the evil sight, whispering faintly to himself, “Father! Oh, father!” In dark corners of the house, and more often outside the house in a wooded little solitude of pines, where scarcely a bird’s wings fluttered to disturb the dark silence, Boy would sit by himself meditating, and occasionally reading—for he had been quick to learn his letters, and study offered as yet no very painful difficulties to him. He was naturally a boy of bright brain and acute perception—but the brightness had been darkened and the perception blunted by the ever down-pressing weight of home influences brought about by his father’s degradation and his mother’s indifference. He began to see clearly now that it was not without good cause he had felt sorry for his “Muzzy’s” ugliness, for that ugliness was the outcome of her own fault. He used to wander down to the border of the sea, mechanically carrying a tin pail and wooden spade, and there would sit shovelling in sand and shovelling it out again; and while thus engaged would sometimes find there one or two ladies walking with their children—ladies in trim serge skirts, and tidily belted blouses, and neat sailor-hats set gracefully on prettily arranged hair,—and he could not for the life of him understand why his mother should allow her dress to be less orderly than that of the cook, and her general appearance less inviting and odorous than that of the old woman who came round twice a week to sell prawns and shrimps at the door. And so he brooded and brooded—till on one sudden and alarming day the stolid nursery governess was found on his father’s knee, with his father’s arms clasped round her,—and such an appalling clamour ensued that Boy, who was of course not told the real reason of the disorder, stood terrified and thought every one in the house had gone raving mad, and that he, poor small chap, was left alone in the middle of a howling wilderness. The stolid nursery governess, on being discovered, had promptly fainted, and lay on the floor with her large feet well upturned and more than an inch of stocking exposed;—the “Honourable” Jim rattled out all his stock of oaths till he was black and blue in the face with impotent swearing, and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, plumping heavily down in the nearest convenient chair, lifted up her voice and wept. And in the middle of her weeping, happening to perceive Boy standing on the threshold of the room, very palefaced and half paralysed with fright, she caught him up in her arms and exclaimed, “My poor, dear, injured son!” with a wifely and maternal gusto that was more grotesque than impressive. Boy somehow felt that he was being made ridiculous, though he could not have told why. And when the stolid-faced nursery governess had prolonged her fainting fit as much as was desirable and endurable,—when with many grunts and sighs, spasmodic kicks and plunges, she righted herself, so to speak, first into a sitting posture, and then gradually rose to her feet, a tearful martyr to wrongful suspicions, and, with one injured-innocence look of reproach at Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir and a knowing side-wink at the irate and roaring “Jim,” left the room and afterwards the house, never to return, Boy lived for many days in a state of deep wonderment, not knowing what to make of it. It was a vast puzzle to his young mind, but he was conscious of a certain advantage to himself in the departure of the ill-used young woman, who had so casually superintended his few lessons in the intervals of dressing her hair. He was left very much more alone, and took to wandering—“daunering” as the Scotch would say—all about the village and down by the edge of the sea, like a small waif of the world, neglected and astray. He was free to amuse himself as he liked, so he strolled into all sorts of places, dirty and clean, and got his clothes torn and ragged, his hands and face scratched and soiled; and if it chanced that he fell into a mud-puddle or a sea-pool—which he often did—he never thought of telling his mother that he was wet through, because she never noticed it, and he therefore concluded that it did not matter. And he began to grow thin, and wiry, and brown, and unkempt, till there was very little difference in appearance between him and the common boys of the village, who were wont to haunt the sea-shore and pick up stray treasures in the way of weed and shell and wreckage there,—boys with whom he very soon began to fraternise, much to his detriment. They were not bad boys—but their language was brutal, and their manners more so. They called him a “ninny” when he first sought their society, and one big lout beat him on the head for his too sharp discovery of a shilling buried in the sand. But these were trifles; and after proving that he was not afraid of a ducking, or a stand-up fight either, they relented towards him, and allowed him to be an associate of their scavenger pursuits. Thus he learnt new forms of language and new customs of life, and gradually adopted the lazy, slouching walk of his shore-companions, together with their air of general indifference, only made occasionally piquant by a touch of impudence. Boy began to say sharp things now and then, though his little insolences savoured more of satire than malice. He did not mean to be rude at any time, but a certain vague satisfaction moved him when he found that he could occasionally make an observation which caused his elders to wince, and privately wonder whether their grey hairs were not standing on end. He rather repressed this power, however, and thought a good deal more than he said. He began to consider his mother in a new light,—her ways no longer puzzled him so much as they amused him. It was with almost a humorous condescension that the child sat down obediently to his morning lessons with her,—lessons which she, with much elaboration and importance, had devised for his instruction. Truth to tell, they were very easy samples of learning,—her dense brain was not capable of arranging anything more than the most ordinary forms of study,—and Boy learnt more of the world in an hour’s listening to the chat of the fishermen on the quay, than his “Muzzy” could have taught him in a hundred years. There was in particular one old, old man, wrinkled and weather-beaten, whose sole life’s business seemed to be to sit on a tar-barrel and smoke his pipe, except when he gave a hand to help pull in the fishing smacks as they came to shore laden with herring or mackerel. He was known in the place by the nickname of “Rattling Jack,”—and to him Boy would often go, and with half bold, half shy questions would draw him out to tell stories of the sea, though the old chap was not very fond of harking back to his past life and adventures, and generally preferred to expound short essays on the conduct of life, drawn from his long experience.
“Aye, there y’are,” he said on one occasion, when Boy, with some pride, brought for his inspection a beautiful rose-coloured sea-anemone which he had managed to detach from the rocks and carry off in his tin pail. “There y’are, you see! Now ye’ve made a fellow-creature miserable y’are as ’appy as the day is long! Eh, eh—why for mussy’s sake didn’t ye leave it on the rocks in the sun with the sea a-washin’ it an’ the blessin’ of the Lord A’mighty on it? They things are jes’ like human souls—there they stick on a rock o’ faith and hope maybe, jes’ wantin’ nothin’ but to be let alone; and then by-and-by some one comes along that begins to poke at ’em, and pull ’em about, and wake up all their sensitiveness-like—’urt ’em as much as possible, that’s the way!—and then they pulls ’em off their rocks and carries ’em off in a mean little tin pail! Ay, ay, ye may call a tin pail whatever ye please—a pile o’ money or a pile o’ love—it’s nought but a tin pail—not a rock with the sun shinin’ upon it. And o’ coorse they dies—there ain’t no sense in livin’ in a tin pail.”
These remarks being somewhat profound, were rather beyond Boy’s comprehension, but he gathered something of their sense and looked rather wistfully at his sea-trophy.
“Will it die now?” he asked anxiously.
“Av coorse it will! How’d you like to be off your own blessed rock, and squeeged into a pail? Come now, tell me that! Wouldn’t you kick the bucket over?—Hor—hor—hor!” and the old man laughed hoarsely at what he considered a bright and natural witticism—“an’ die an’ ’ave done with it?”
“I suppose I should,” answered Boy meditatively. “What do you do when you die?”
“I ain’t done it yet,” replied Rattling Jack rather testily. “But I expec’ when I ’ave to, I’ll do it as well as my betters—stretch out my legs, turn up my toes, shut up my eyes, chuckle-chuckle in my windpipe, and go slick off. There ain’t no particular style o’ doing it.”